Buzz

Potty mouth

So City Council member Laura Miller says she never said those mean things about untidy, code-violating Hispanic businesses in Oak Cliff that the Dallas Observer quoted her as saying in our August 30 edition.

Here's what she says she didn't say: "I'm going to go up and down that motherfucking street, and if they don't shape up and comply, I'm gonna close those fuckers down."

Now, Buzz wasn't in on the conversation, so we didn't actually hear the words ourselves; Jim Schutze supplied the quote for use in the story "Vamoose," about Miller's efforts to close down a bus depot operating on Davis Street near a residential neighborhood. Did Schutze get it wrong? Did we just make it up? Is Miller telling the truth when she told TV reporters that she would never say something like that?

Fat fucking chance. People around the office who know Miller, a former Observer columnist, were surprised she didn't say a whole lot worse. Like Buzz, like most people in this business, like our own wife and our mother (before she got religion), Miller has a potty mouth. Apparently, she has a double-jointed one as well. She can speak out of both sides of it at the same time. Of course she can. Whatever she once was, she's now a politician.

And that, not the vulgar words, is the point. When it comes to politics, Miller--pardon our French--sucks. As staffer Thomas Korosec reported in "Vamoose," Lucano Transports owner Alma Vazquez last month asked Miller and city officials for more time to relocate her depot because her husband apparently committed suicide. Miller should have hugged Vazquez's neck, cried like Richard Simmons at a fat woman's funeral and told her, "Of course, dear woman, take another month. And God bless." Then, on the way out of the room, she should have opened the other side of her mouth and whispered to the code officers, "Give her 30 days, then shut that fucker down."

You're not required to actually possess a heart to succeed in politics, but you'd better be able to fake it...at least in public, especially when you're talking to reporters.

Now, Miller is saying that she intends to work with all the bus lines serving working-class Mexican immigrants in her district and attempt to find a proper depot for them. Good for her. Good lesson learned, if only about a month too late, and she can thank us for the schooling.